


And words are all I can bequest

by Ruta



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst and Humor, Drama & Romance, F/M, Feels, Idiots in Love, Longing, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 12:52:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18993043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: "You don't understand." His knuckles are tight around the knife, stiff and white as stone. "She broke an oath.""You did too with Ygritte."He raises his head abruptly and the rage that devours him, parching, is nothing compared to the pain that passes through him like a tide, similar to that of infected and rotten wounds. "It's not the same."(Sansa asks for a meeting with a representative of the free folk. When Tormund comes back, Jon can barely contain himself.)





	And words are all I can bequest

"Did you see her?"  
  
Tormund doesn't seem to have heard him. A snowstorm is raging outside. There are ice crystals on the furs that he wears. He shakes off the snow and rubs his hair and beard with both hands. Despite the hood covering his head, for an instant he looked like he will be at the end of his life, an old white-haired man.  
  
Jon waits a little longer, but to be quiet, holding back, becomes more difficult with every minute that goes by. He wants to know. He needs to. Not knowing it's killing him.  
  
_You should have gone then. You refused. This is your fault._  
  
He sees him pulling three hares out of the saddlebag. He throws one to Ghost and sits down, starting to peel one of the others.  
  
Halfway through the work, he sighs, scratching an eyebrow. "You're the most boring man of the fucking seven kingdoms," Tormund says, pointing the knife in his direction. "Stop standing there and sit by the fire. There's a damn storm. Get your butt in here and start helping."  
  
Jon goes to sit in front of him and forces himself to take the second hare. While he is carving the four cuts, his mind is like a target practice for all the questions he wants to ask him.  
  
_Did you see her? How did she seem to you? She asked about me?_ In the end, he chooses the easiest, "What did she want?"  
  
"Straight to the point." Tormund has already opened the hare from belly to chest, now he is spreading it with his fingers and pulling out the intestines. "You're not interested in anything else?"  
  
Jon doesn't answer. Tormund lifts his head. The ferrous odor of blood plumps the air, impregnates his large gnarled hands.  
  
"She made me a proposal. She knew I wouldn't accept it, but she did it anyway."  
  
He frowns. "What did she offer?"  
  
"A choice. The possibility of a change. We only had it once before, but never like this. We have always thought we had to fight to get what we want. Us against you, you against us. Then you come." Tormund grins, proud. "You, a little crow. You open the doors of your castle. You speak for us, you live with us and you get killed for us. And now there she is, the smart Ladyluck."  
  
His heart beats like a drum into his chest. "What did she tell you?"  
  
"The choice is yours as mine is my offer. I will not choose for you. The north remembers, that's what she said. She offered me lands and a castle. If we want them they are ours."  
  
"You refused."  
  
"Not yet. I want to talk about it with the clans. She said there's no hurry. The castle she offers, apparently she's deciding whether to have it dismantled. The name sounds like horse piss."  
  
Dreadfort. He's talking about the Bolton castle. He doesn't know whether to feel admiration or pity. In indecision his stomach twists.  
  
"Aren't you really going to ask? You coward. Grow some hair on your balls."  
  
Ghost has finished gnawing bones.  
  
The red gleam of his eyes strikes him before Tormund's disappointment. He remembers a stone quay, months of solitude and darkness, three figures observed in the distance from a lifeboat through a veil of smoke and tears. "What do you expect?" He grunts. "She betrayed me."  
  
"How? Because she tried to knock some sense into your head?"  
  
"You don't understand." His knuckles are tight around the knife, stiff and white as stone. "She broke an oath."  
  
"You did too with Ygritte."  
  
He raises his head abruptly and the rage that devours him, parching, is nothing compared to the pain that passes through him like a tide, similar to that of infected and rotten wounds. "It's not the same."  
  
"She loves you."  
  
The heat in the tent is unbearable. Sweat stuck to his hair against the temples and at the base of the neck. As is the intense expression of Tormund. He is forced to look away. "You don't know what you're talking about."  
  
"You're a bad liar." Without seeing it, he can feel Tormund's smile, like a dagger with a curved blade stuck in his skull. "I don't know how they bought all that bullshit with the dragon woman."  
  
As for Ygritte, his body has an instant reaction of rejection and suffering. A spasm of pain as if it had been immersed in boiling oil. "I don't want to talk about her," he says again and stands up, after having thrown the pieces of hare into the cauldron.  
  
He wants to go out, he wants to immerse himself in the cold that atrophies the senses and perceptions, the cold that sends to sleep thoughts. He wants to forget, he wants the comfortable silence of the night, that the storm swallows him up in blinding white.

Tormund doesn't give him a chance. In two steps he is in front of him and pushes him hard. "Or what?" He must read in his eyes the desire he feels to tear something to pieces because he immediately asks, in part grunting in part hope, "Do you want to fight? Maybe you will stop doing the fucking martyr's thing! Whether you loved her or not what changes? She's dead! Just like Ygritte. She's lost, you'll never get her back. Do you want to keep crying for the rest of your fricking life?"  
  
At the umpteenth push, he blocks him by grabbing him by the wrist and twisting it.  
  
Tormund doesn't retreat, but the fury in his blue eyes subsides and concern becomes evident.  
  
Giving him his back, Jon feels his gaze as he goes through the tent to grab his fur coat, Ghost already at his side with his snout streaked with dried blood.  
  
"You can escape from the truth, but not from yourself." The echo of his voice follows him in the howling wind outside.  
  
*  
  
He doesn't last long. Two days later, his anger has cooled, calming down with the end of the storm. It hasn't disappeared, he thinks that it will never truly abandon him. It's part of him. Fire and ash, ice and loneliness. He didn't sleep, barely stopped, burning off any remaining energy by chopping wood or in the forge.  
  
He finds him at the edge of the camp, where the forest begins. His back is resting against an ashtree, a small fire to warm him. He is sharpening the tip of an arrow, he has a quiver resting against his right leg. Jon flies over the pain in his heart at that sight and goes to sit next to him.  
  
The sunset colors the ice sky with red, copper and orange gold refractions, transversal gleams of light between the low clouds on the horizon. Gods fingers, he thinks.  
  
Neither of them breaks the silence for a while. Tormund continues to work, the stack of arrows increases at his feet.  
  
Jon sighs and stares at his skinned hands. "Tell me about her." And more important than all the rest, anger and rancor, nostalgia and regret, the question that irks his conscience, on which rest the foundations of peace in the world that he has chosen, "Did she look happy?"  
  
"You should have seen her. You would have been proud of her. She's magnificent. Sitting on her throne, with the crown and everything else. You would have cried like a baby."  
  
Tormund speaks and speaks for the rest of the night.  
  
Jon stares into the fire, among the branches of the snow-covered trees thousands of stars look at them from above and laugh at their problems, their worries. They must seem so poor compared to the grandeur of the rest. Even for him they have been, only two or three times in his life. Clinging to the back of a flying green dragon, the world acquired a new dimension, less human, more real than ever.

There are things that make you believe in the existence of gods. The Wall. The heart tree. And the depth of a boundless love, unable to bend, break, bow, that roars and howls and scratchs and tears, but also heals and fills the empty spaces of the heart. It convinces you that for something like this it's right to endure any torture, witness any atrocities, commit the worst crimes, even betraying the kind of man you thought you were. It makes you hope and makes you believe in songs like a fool.  
  
Tormund continues to talk.

She is lonely, he would like to ask. The answer is in Tormund's stories. She's too busy to feel lonely. Her days as queen are a frenzy of commitments, meetings, missives, repairs. But at night, after she retired to her rooms, she took off her crown and braided her thick hair, while sitting by the fireplace drinking wine and reading her Maester's notes or a final dispatch, a last rolled parchment or one of Arya's rare letters, does she realize in the sudden silence that surrounds her that she is alone? Does she ever feel like the world is imploding behind her eyelids, under her ribs? Does she ever feel on the brink of a precipice?  
  
He can see her. The rich color of her hair. The shape of her face. The particular sparkle in her eyes. The smile hidden in the corner of her soft mouth. Her voice, the touch of her slender hands, the warmth of her tall, thin body pressed against his.  
  
Sansa. Her name is a sigh in his mind, the first agonizing breath after he risked drowning, spat all the water out of his lungs with his chest seeming to be on fire. It isn't pleasant, but it's a pain necessary to survive.  
  
_Gods_ , how much he misses her.  
  
"You have that face again," says Tormund.  
  
Jon grimaces. "Don't start again."  
  
He takes one of the wooden rods and begins to tie the pointed carved stones tightly to the end. This are familiar and well-known gestures, such as handling a sword, dipping the fingers in Ghost's fur, closing the eyes and evoking a sweet scent of flowers, a slim waist, shoulders shaken by silent sobs, cheeks streaked with sober tears even in the depths of sadness.  
  
"You're stubborn."  
  
Jon shakes his head and a corner of his mouth rises in a reluctant smile. "You're one to talk."  
  
"It seems that we kissed by fire have a soft spot for you. Ladyluck is no exception."  
  
"She is a queen now," he says, but the reproach is devoid of any real bite. "You should talk about her less informally."  
  
"Bullshit. She likes it when I call her that."  
  
He has no reason to doubt it. Other memories spill over him like raindrops. An auburn braid in the candlelight, the heavy breathing at the end of a quarrel, dilated pupils and parted lips.  
  
"She misses you."  
  
Not a shudder runs through his fingers. He knots yet another string. "Did she tell you?"  
  
"Aye," Tormund replies, his eyes gleaming with mirth, "and we braided each other's hair."  
  
The idea is too ridiculous and they both burst out laughing. They change. Tormund hands him the piece of bone for the most precise chipping and Jon lets him assemble the pieces togheter.  
  
"You miss her."  
  
To deny would be foolish. "How I miss Arya and Bran."  
  
Out of the corner of his eye he sees him run a hand over his red beard. "She's all alone in that huge castle."  
  
"She is a queen," he replies flatly, as if the thought had no importance. "I doubt she's ever really alone."  
  
With a wisdom that few have been lucky enough to see, he hears him say, "You can be alone even when you're surrounded by people. She is alone, but she found what she was looking for, her place in the world. And you?"  
  
The words resound inside him as an echo in the caves. "What do you want to know?"  
  
"Why are you here?"  
  
Because I can't be there, he would like to say, but it wouldn't be the truth, not completely.  
  
How can he explain it? He never felt freer than during the moments he spent with Ygritte, with Tormund, with the free folk. Beyond the Wall he is not a bastard, he is not a lord commander and he is not a king, he is not a murderer. Beyond the Wall the world doesn't expect anything from him, it has no pretensions. Not that Sansa has any. He knows that if he comes back, she would never ask him anything and maybe that's what keeps him. Knowing that she deserves so much more than a broken, wounded man, with no more honor.  
  
Being with her is impossible, a dream of spring. Perhaps in the future, when the weight of what he has done becomes easier to carry and doesn't bow his head, it will not burn him like this.  
  
Maybe. Maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> The last episode ended, spent among screams and curses, with the sole exception of the reaction to the antepenultimate and last scene. When Jon says his final goodbye to the Starks, I am not ashamed to admit I burst into tears, shouting that "it can't end like this. They can't really split up!" and "what about the pack??"
> 
> Then the thought, calm and lucid and desperately realistic: growing up means exactly this, to take your own path, to cut ties, to distance yourself from the safe confines of the nest, to take flight in solitude and find out the kind of person you truly are.


End file.
